Indeed, I’ve been working on a RESTful API for my wireless sensors. I was a newbie and despite many roadblocks, let me assure you that it is amazing how server/web services technologies are accessible nowadays!
Anyway, now that I have a home-brew Java web services running locally, I tried to load it on a cloud server and below is the procedure I followed.

Cloud server providers:

I’ve been looking at Amazon EC2 and Mosso. I’ve decided to go for the latter:

• Price: Mosso provides cloud server starting at about 15$ a month for 256MB RAM or 30$ for a 512MB.
• Ease-of-use: Creating a server instance is straight-forward with Mosso.
  Once the server is created, server informations ( login/pw/ip ) are sent over by email. SSH connection gives you root permissions.
  Whereas EC2 server configuration is more tricky
• Reliability, scalability, security: I would discuss those topics later on since I haven’t been confronted to them yet.
  Should you have any opinion, please chime in!

Server creation with Mosso:

Launching a server instance with Mosso is a breeze. Once an account is registered, one can access a neat admin page whereby a new server instance can be created on-demand.
Several OS are available and I’ve picked up CentOS 5.2 because it was the first one in the list !
Below is a server creation page screenshot:

Mosso Cloud Server

MySQL installation:

To install MySQL, just follow the procedure below:

1. Connect to your server:
ssh root@yourIP
2. Download and install MySQL thanks to ‘yum” command:
yum install mysql-server mysql mysql-devel
3. Start MySQL:
/etc/init.d/mysqld start
4. Add MySQL user:
CREATE USER 'yourUsername' IDENTIFIED BY 'yourPassword';
CREATE USER 'yourUsername'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'yourPassword';
GRANT ALL ON *.* TO 'yourUsername' IDENTIFIED BY 'yourPassword';
GRANT ALL ON *.* TO 'yourUsername'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'yourPassword';
5. That’s it!

Tomcat 6, Java 1.6 and ActiveMQ 5.2:

Although ‘yum’ could be used,  I’d rather download locally the packages for Tomact, Java and ActiveMQ.
Now, let’s schlep those packages to my cloud server:

1. Download Tomcat 6 , Java 6 and ActiveMQ 5.2
2. Uncompress and copy the binaries respectively under /usr/tomcat ,  /usr/java/ and usr/activemq/ as below:
scp -r /jdk1.6.0_05 root@yourIP:/usr/java/
scp -r 6.0.18/ root@yourIP:/usr/tomcat/
scp -r activemq5.2/ root@yourIP:/usr/activemq

Environment variables:

Let’s create a .bash_profile file to set environment variables properly as below:
My .bash profile:

#java
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_05/
export JRE_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_05/jre/
#tomcat
export CATALINA_HOME=/usr/tomcat/6.0.18/
#activemq
export ACTIVEMQ_HOME=/usr/activemq/5.2/
#mysql
export MYSQL=/usr/bin/
export mysql=/usr/bin/mysql
export mysqladmin=/usr/bin/mysqladmin
#export PATH
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$CATALINA_HOME/bin:$JRE_HOME/bin:$ACTIVEMQ_HOME:$MYSQL:$PATH

Start Tomcat and ActiveMQ:

1. Start ActiveMQ ( if needed ):
/usr/activemq/5.2/bin/activemq
2. Start Tomcat:
/usr/tomcat/6.0.18/bin/startup.sh
3. That’s it…. check whether http://yourIP:8080 loads the Tomcat admin page.

Conclusion:

Within few steps away, one can easily create a server instance on-demand.
Mosso Cloud Server is very appealing and user-friendly. However  I am contemplating to switch over to Amazon EC2 for evaluation purposes.
The reasoning is that Mosso does not provide a way to save home-brew server configurations with specific load of applications whereas Amazon EC2 with its AMIs ( Amazon Machine Instance ) may provide this useful capability.

I’ll keep you posted!